ICML 2026poster0 citations

PPT-Eval: A Benchmark for Computer-Use Agents on PowerPoint Tasks

Apurva Gandhi, Vishwas Suryanarayanan, Firoz Shaik, Raja Anwar, Shubhang Desai, Thong Nguyen, Muhammad Raza, Vishal Chowdhary

Abstract

Creating and editing slides is a rich, multimodal activity that is ubiquitous in professional and educational settings, making it an ideal testbed for real-world computer-use agents. Microsoft PowerPoint is among the most widely adopted and feature-rich environments for presentation creation. We introduce PPT-Eval, a benchmark of 120 diverse PowerPoint tasks across 12 files that cover both content creation and presentation editing scenarios, organized by difficulty. A central challenge in this domain is evaluation: tasks are complex, multimodal, and often admit many valid solutions. Moreover, today’s agents frequently make only partial progress, which binary success metrics fail to capture. To address this, we design a robust evaluation framework to help create task-specific rubrics for PowerPoint tasks, taking inspiration from and building on past works for rubric-based evaluation. These rubrics award partial credit for intermediate steps, penalize unnecessary changes and poor aesthetics, and provide natural language feedback. This nuanced approach proves highly effective, achieving a Kendall's $\tau_b$ correlation of 0.77 with human judgments. We find that existing frontier agents still struggle with solving PowerPoint tasks, with strong models like Claude-4.5-Opus achieving only a 43\% success rate and an average partial score of 59\%.

AgentsRobustnessMultimodalRetrievalBenchmark
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
gandhi2026ppteval,
title={{PPT}-Eval: A Benchmark for Computer-Use Agents on PowerPoint Tasks},
author={Apurva Gandhi and Vishwas Suryanarayanan and Raja Hasnain Anwar and Firoz Shaik and Shubhang Desai and Thong Q. Nguyen and Muhammad Taqi Raza and Vishal Chowdhary and Graham Neubig},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=GmeK95WQQ4}
}